Tips for Those New to Clash of Clans
:thumbsup::thumbsup:All credit for writing this guide goes to Half=Breed, leader of the clan Legitimacy. The part he wrote is in regular type, which makes up the majority of the guide, obviously. here is his forum profile page.:thumbsup::thumbsup:
What is farming?
Your focus as a new player to clash is to raid for gold and elixir (also known as farming) so you can upgrade your village. The following tips are to help you find and keep that gold and elixir.
What are trophies for?
Trophies were made by Supercell (the game's creator) as a way to keep track of top players, and they do serve that purpose at very high levels. However at any level up until you hit Town Hall level 9 or so, they mean practically nothing. All they do is determine who your opponents are when you farm. You are matched with opponents that are within +-200 trophies of you. Generally, the higher you go, the harder the bases are to raid, so find a trophy range where you can raid bases at a profit.
Also, don't worry about losing trophies too much. It's very easy to win them back with an attack or two. There are often times you will actually want to intentionally lose attacks so you can stay in your desired farming range.
Trophies also determine your league level, and in effect also affect your win bonus, which is a set amount of loot you will gain for winning a raid (getting 1 or more stars). This league bonus may factor into which trophy range you choose to farm in, but make sure it's a league you can farm in fairly easily.
Keep your Town Hall (TH) outside your walls!
This seems counterintuitive at first, but this is why:
Basically, "winning" defenses mean nothing. As a matter of fact, winning a defense is bad. When you win a defense, your clan castle troops that help defend your base are likely dead and your traps have been set off, yet you don't get a 12 hour shield to protect you from further attacks. The next attacker that comes along will have a much easier time taking all your loot.
If you keep your TH outside your walls and unprotected by any defenses or traps, people often "snipe" your TH and then surrender, taking nothing but 1000 gold and elixir and giving you a cheap 12 hour shield from getting raided. You then can rest easy knowing your loot is protected until the 12 hours is up or you decide to break your shield and start raiding again.
In any case, you do not want to protect your TH with walls, defenses, or traps. Don't do it.
Don't double up your walls
Wallbreakers do splash damage, meaning that they do damage to more than one unit of wall. Doubling up on walls doesn't help you from wallbreakers at all, it just wastes your walls. Use them somewhere else.
Login to the game often enough to empty your gold mines and elixir collectors before your shield runs out!
50% of any loot contained in your gold mines and your elixir collectors can be taken during a raid. Only 20% or less of your loot is available from your gold and elixir storages. As long as you log in and collect your gold/elix before your shield expires, you will have much less loot available to lose the next time you get attacked.
Spend your loot!
As mentioned above, how much loot you have available to attackers is based on how much loot is contained in your collectors and storages. If you spend your loot on upgrades and have very little loot, your base won't be an attractive target. The best way to accomplish this is to spend any extra gold you have on walls before starting a new gold upgrade.
An example: You have a builder that just came free and you want to upgrade a cannon for 100K. You have 300K in gold saved though. Instead of just upgrading your cannon and sit on 200K of gold, spend most of the extra 200K on walls (save some though so you can still press NEXT when raiding). That way you have almost no loot available to raid and people will ignore your base instead of attacking it.
Make sure you have enough loot and/or can farm enough loot to keep a builder working if you have one freeing up in the next day or two. Having sleeping builders drastically slows down your progress through the game.
Once you get to Town Hall 7 or so, walls start to get expensive. Once upgrades also start taking a long time, and you are farming so much that you are sitting on too much loot with no builders, start to just keep one builder open to work on walls. So don't start any upgrades with this builder, unless it's something really important that you have to do quickly. This way, you won't have a bunch of gold lying around, because if you do have that much loot sitting there, people will take it from you and that loot will go to waste.
What should I protect behind my walls?
The only things you want to protect until TH7 or so are your defenses and your gold/elix storages. As I mentioned before, as long as you frequently collect from your gold/elix collectors, you don't need to protect those.
Keep your Clan Castle (CC) full of troops when you log off!
Your CC is actually very important to the defense of your base. 10 level 6 archers (some of us have them) do 220 points of damage per second, while a level 5 cannon only does 25 points of damage per second. Always keep your CC full before logging off the game.
Which troops are good on defense?
So now that you know you want to keep your CC full, what troops should you ask for on defense?
Good troops for defense are:
Archers, Wizards, Dragons, Valkaries, Minions, and Witches. Dragons, Valkaries, and Witches are expensive though, so please don't make a habit of always asking for them.
If you want to increase your donation count, there are two ways to go about doing this. 1. Just donate archers, but be on a lot and be raiding. When you see a request, donate to it. If your clan doesn't request a lot, it may be a sign they aren't very active. 2. Cook slightly bigger troops. I like to cook BAM sometimes (barbarians, archers, minions). I always end up with too many minions for my liking. But this is good, because when I donate minions, which are nice for defense as well as offense, people like it, I get twice the amount of donation (and XP to level up), and I even out the number of minions in ratio to my barbs and archers. Another "big" troop you can donate is wizards, though I don't recommend it as they are very expensive. You may want to donate giants to raise your donation count, but many people don't like giants in their clan castle, as they are horrible on defense. Overall though, don't cook anything special for donations (unless someone wanted something specific or it's a war request, of course) on a regular basis, as this takes away from farming, pushing, or whatever you're doing at the moment.
Terrible troops for defense are:
Wallbreakers, Healers, Pekkas, and Hog Riders, and goblins.
Goblins in CC: They are not good at all for clan castle attack reinforcement. If there is any splash nearby, the splash will wipe them out as they come in, since they all spawn from the same spot, so you can't deploy them spread out. However, they are faster, though have less HP, than barbarians, so can be useful sometimes on defense. For example, if someone is going to attack you with hog riders in a war, those goblins can distract the hog riders very well due to their speed.
At low TH levels though, any troop from one of our TH8s and above that are not a part of the terrible category would be pretty good on defense.
Queue your troops BEFORE looking for a raid!
You can save time building attack armies if you queue up your next army before starting too look for a base to raid. The way it works is that as soon as you start to look for a raid, the time spent looking/attacking is applied to whatever troops are queued up in your barracks. So for example, if you spent 5 minutes looking for and finally attacking a base, 5 minutes worth of whatever was in your barracks would already be cooked and ready to go after your attack.
One caveat, if you decide not to attack and back out of the search screens your barracks reset and the timer for cooking troops starts all over again. Basically, if you've been looking for a base to attack for a while, its usually worth it to go ahead and attack a base that might not normally have as much loot as you look for since your next army will be almost done after the attack.
In any case, always queue up your troops before attacking!
When raiding, press NEXT more often than you think you should.
The NEXT button is your friend. There are juicy bases with full, easy to get to collectors (remember, you get 50% of whatever is in a collector) if you are patient enough. Keep nexting until you find a base that you know you make a large profit off of. At lower TH levels, the acceptable amount to raid for is less, but make an effort to raid for at least 100K or more of total resources (gold/elix combined) than you spent on your army.
Deploy your troops with multiple fingers!
It's often really important to deploy the main thrust of your attack quickly (i.e. it's ok to use a single finger to pick off some outside buildings, but when you are ready to start the main attack, use multiple fingers). Deploying troops with only one finger allows defenses to pick them off easily as they go towards the base. By deploying multiple troops quickly, your troops will overwhelm defenses much more easily.
Keep clearing your trees and rocks!
New trees/bushes spawn every 8 hours as long as they don't spawn on top of an existing building/decoration/tree. Because some of them contain gems, and there's a total limit of 40 trees/rocks you can have at any one time, you want to keep clearing your trees and rocks so you earn the maximum possible amount of free gems.
The same thing goes with a gem box, clear it right away because you can never have more than one gem box so you are potentially missing out on more gems if you don't clear it.
How should I spend my gems?
First off, save your gems for at least your 3rd builder, and if you play at all regularly, your 4th. Builders are the BEST thing for you to spend your gems on. As long as you have an easy time of keeping your builders busy, another builder is a wise purchase, it will help speed up your base development.
After that, gems should only be used to boost your barracks/spell factory. NEVER use them to speed up construction on a building unless it's just a few and you need to get your builder going before going to sleep or something. For more details read this thread.
Personally, I'd say don't spend gems on anything outside of 1-gem events until you have all 5 builders, as having 5 will help you greatly.
I have 5 builders, and now I just have gems accumulating. Once you have your 5 builders like me, go ahead and boost a couple barracks only if you have two hours to sit there and raid. Only boost 2 barracks and maybe your spell factory. You'll have a bit of a downtime (5 minutes or so, but it actually depends on how long you spend nexting, because the longer you spend nexting, the more troops will be ready when you come back), but it saves gems compared to just boosting all four barracks. Sure, this may give you less time between gems, but it's not worth the additional 20 gems. They add up over time.
Should I buy Gems?
It's your money, so I can't tell you what to do, but I'd recommend only buying gems to buy builders. Trees spawn often enough for you occasionally boost your barracks after you reach your desired number of builders. The game is basically an endless money pit if you use gems to buy resources/time. There's no real reason to spend your money on that stuff because there's plenty more to build that will be exponentially more expensive/time consuming.
When should I upgrade my TH?
It is VERY important you don't upgrade your TH too early. See this thread for the full details.
I did not write this guide. The parts of the guide I did write are in blue. I just supplemented the original guide.
Tomatoesarenice helped me out and suggested a lot of things to add, which are in this color, and also some of the ideas that I have in blue are ideas he suggested. Thanks for helping out!
Thanks a lot for reading this post! I hope I helped, and if you have questions or critiques, as well as any typos or anything that I have missed, please reply! I would love to hear from you.
P.S. Sorry, I believe this is in the wrong forum. It should be in New To Clash. Maybe a mod can move this...?
